business
J&J executive to lead Avon
- Updated: April 9, 2012 - 8:47 PM
- 0
- comments
resize text 
- buy reprints
Battered by the recession, Johnson & Johnson turned in 2009 to Sherilyn S. McCoy, a longtime executive who had joined the company as a scientist in 1982, to overhaul the company's pharmaceutical division. It was a wrenching process that involved restructuring the business at a time when patents on important drugs were expiring. That experience will come in handy in her new job. Monday, Avon Products announced that it had hired McCoy as its new chief executive.
She takes over a 126-year-old company that is known for its army of door-to-door sales representatives but has been struggling in recent years with declining sales, a bribery investigation and increasingly restless investors. Avon's profits have declined every year since 2008. This month, Avon promptly rejected a $10 billion unsolicited takeover offer from Coty, a smaller privately held supplier of beauty products and celebrity fragrances, thinking that the bid undervalued the company. McCoy succeeds Andrea Jung, who took over as chief executive in 1999 and was initially praised for revitalizing a tired brand and energizing its sales force. She was among the first to push into developing markets like China and Russia.
Sony to eliminate 10,000 jobsSony Corp. will cut 10,000 jobs, or 6 percent of its workforce, as the Japanese electronics conglomerate and its new chief executive try to wiggle back into the black. The company's new head, Kazuo Hirai, will confirm the reductions in what is sure to be a heavily watched briefing on Thursday, the country's Nikkei newspaper reported Monday.
Hirai, who took over from Howard Stringer earlier this month, must attempt to steer Sony from its predicted fourth consecutive annual loss back to fighting form against stronger device-making rivals such as Apple Inc.
Much of the employee scale-backs will come from Sony's deeply unprofitable television business, which has been losing money for the better part of a decade to lower-cost competitors such as Samsung and Vizio.
Roughly half of the job cuts will stem from recent deals, including Sony's sale of a chemicals company last month and a spinoff of its LCD production capabilities into a joint operation with Hitachi and Toshiba last year. The company had more than 168,000 employees as of March 2011.
NEWS SERVICES
- 0
- comments
- resize text
- buy reprints
ADVERTISEMENT
- Medtronic cutting 2,000 jobs worldwide, 500 in Minnesota
- Apple CEO: 'We pay all the taxes we owe — every single dollar'
- Stocks gain on reassurance from a top Fed official
- Alexander: What TV system for a digital age?
- Small company stock are a bright spot
- Our sky-high gas prices expected to last until June
- Hubert White store remodeling bodes well for downtown retail boom
- Target testing its own movie streaming service
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
inside the StarTribune
-
425 Portland Av. S.
Minneapolis, MN 55488
(612) 673-4000
- Company
- Subscriber Services
- Website
- Buy Ads
- Store
- Connect with Us
© 2013 StarTribune. All rights reserved.
StarTribune.com is powered by Limelight Networks
Newspaper Subscriptions
eEdition
RSS
Newsletters